Book Review - Shellac & Sheetrock, by David Owen

My chops had been watering for a long time to get my hot mitts on this book. When I first read reviews of Shellac & Sheetrock, I thought I had found a kindred soul in the author.

In the mid-1980s, David Owen, a New Yorker staff writer, began to renovate a 200 year-old house in Northwest Connecticut--largely with his own hands but with the intercession of contractors and tradesmen at key points. Like Owen, my wife and I had taken on a huge, old house with the idea of being very involved in the renovation process.

Owen describes moving from the superintended Manhattan apartment, where even interior painting is done by management, to this extreme opposite some 90 miles north. The house that Owen and his wife, Ann, would eventually buy and renovate was a prep-school dormitory that had been sawn in half to move to its present location. Quite visible seams in the floor show where the two halves had been stitched back together.

The book begins movingly. Almost every third paragraph my heart welled up and I found myself saying, "Yes, someone else too has felt this way." Owen describes the tantalizing feeling of opening up his first wall and hoping to find "clay tobacco pipes, gold coins, and arrowheads," but of course finding nothing like that. He relates getting hung up over a seemingly simple task: stripping wallpaper. After trying various methods--scraping, sanding, steaming, soaking--he eventually covers up some of these stubbornly papered walls with a layer of Sheetrock (which, by the way, may seem like "cheating" but is a perfectly valid way or dealing with cosmetic problems like this).

Owen describes being so taken by his office remodeling project that whenever he had ten minutes to spare he would run upstairs and pound a few more nails; the paradox of demolishing a room (the demo rubble creates more volume than can be contained in the room, necessitating frequent contractor-bag removals); and how one renovation project often maddeningly is dependent on the completion of yet another renovation project (the billiard table means that the floor needs to be strengthened; floor strengthening leads to creation of a small room in the basement; etc.).

But Owen's chapter titled "The Big Kitchen Project" falls dead flat. Because it is so highly trafficked--a vital room that provides nourishment to family, friends, relatives--one would expect Owen to dig deep into the core of what it means to renovate a kitchen. Instead, it comes off like a lengthy email or, worse, yet another of these personal Blogger blogs you see all the time, Here's Us Renovating Our Kitchen. They choose a glass-top stove. They choose a Sub-Zero fridge. They avoid KitchenAid appliances. One bright spot in the kitchen renovation chapter includes a section on choosing kitchen flooring (vinyl is ugly but most practical; linoleum is trendy; hardwood acceptable but not the best choice.

Empathy further drained away when the story shifts from renovating the old house to...building a completely new "cabin" (read: house) in the woods. All stories need a protagonist and an antagonist. Protagonist wrestles with the antagonist and hopefully comes out on top. In renovation stories, the antagonist is the house. You want to see the hero complete the renovation and come out ahead. But here the 200 year-old house disappears from view for awhile, and you begin to think: Gosh, if he's got enough money to build a whole new house (sorry, cabin), let's whip that darned renovation project into shape right-quick!

Owen redeems himself with later, excellent sections on Sheetrock and, guess what, shellac. Also bolstering this book is the fact that Owen never lets the book fall into that weepy "money pit" cliche (we had high hopes; house was a pit; funny things ensued; lesson: don't try this). Often and most of the time, Owen does come out ahead, which is a real ego boost to any DIY renovator out there.

Buy Direct - Shellac & Sheetrock : A Thinking Person's Guide to the Art and Science of Home Improvement